Tag: BLOCK

It's act three of Google vs. China. We've seen the two duke it out over accusations of cyberwarfare and search engine censorship, and now Google is throwing down the gauntlet over interference with Gmail. According to The Guardian, the number of complaints from Gmail users and advertisers in China has steadily risen of late. Google believes that the problems are the result of "a government ...

While you can't see the Great Firewall of China from space, its reach is global -- preventing those on the inside from accessing sites on the outside. Recently, another popular Web service was added to the block list: SugarSync. As the company's Laura Yecies points out in a blog post, SugarSync's aim "is to make information access fast, easy and ubiquitous." That, of course, is a philosophy ...

We're not very big fans of browser toolbars to begin with, and today's news from Mozilla is a perfect example of why. The Mozilla team has decided to block the Skype plug-in, citing serious stability and performance issues. Skype will be added to Mozilla's plug-in blocklist, though users will be prompted and given the option to re-enable it if they wish. As Stephen Shankland points out over at ...

So you just hunkered down to read a glorious thousand-word epic about why the Web loves cats -- only to find yourself staring at hundreds of comments which ruined your reading experience with their harshness. If only you'd had some sort of filter for your browser which could hide those sections so you could read in peace! There's shutup.css, which automatically blocks comments on every site it ...

A rumor went around over the weekend that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg couldn't be blocked on Facebook. I just checked, and it's true. Like many others who have tried to block Zuck, I just got the infamous "General Block Failed Error" when I tried to block his account. Every site reporting on this phenomenon has tested and confirmed it, but I thought there was a missing piece: are other Facebook ...

Yes, this news is obviously a little bit of chest-pounding from the boys in Redmond, but there's no denying the stat is impressive. Internet Explorer 8's SmartScreen filter has blocked more than 1 billion malicious downloads. SmartScreen is one of the many way IE8 is a big upgrade from previous versions of Microsoft's browser, and clearly a feature which is helping combat the rising tide of ...

Still havingdifficulty coping with the skeletons in your closet? Maybe you need a thicker door -- like the one Ex-blocker can bolt on to your web browser! Head over to their site and enter detailed about your exes -- you can add up to five, which should be plenty. Enter the required details, and Ex-blocker generates you a customized plugin which helps fade them into the background, away from ...

If you've ever copied text from a website only to see an annoying "read more" message attached when you paste it, you've probably run across Tynt. Sites like The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle and even TechCrunch use Tynt to add analytics links to your clipboard when you copy text, so they can tell site owners what their readers are copying. Most people just delete the extra crap after ...

Of all the sites a major mobile ISP could block, Verizon has probably picked the worst. Verizon mobile customers have found themselves unable to access 4Chan's infamous prank-filled, NSFW image board, /b/, and the ISP won't say why. 4Chan's founder, Moot, has even been unable to get a straight answer about the block. However, it's been confirmed that this was an intentional move by Verizon. At ...

Avoiding distractions on while working your computer can be tricky business. Fortunately, there are plenty of great, free apps out there to help you get things done! CinemaDrape, for example, is a great way to turn off the "background noise" so you can focus on one particular app or area of your screen. You can download an installable version of CinemaDrape or grab the portable remix and run ...

Looking for an easy way to keep your children (husband, staff, boss, dog, or anyone else) from viewing adult websites? If your systems are using Firefox to handle web browsing duties, take a look at the ProConn Latte addon.* Latte enables you to filter by keywords and comes packaged with an extensive, preconfigured list of blocked terms and sites. You can, of course, add and remove words and ...

The best time wasters are games that are intellectually challenging, but not necessarily frantic or anxiety-inducing. Too many puzzle games rely on a beat-the-clock scenario to make games more challenging instead of simply making the puzzles more challenging. Well, Sleepy is a time waster that doesn't do that. In Sleepy, the goal is to remove all of the colored blocks from the screen without ...

Savanna Blocks is a falling-blocks puzzle game created by Clockwork Monster that uses a fresh take on a tired genre. In Savanna Blocks your goal is to draw a line through groups of blocks that are touching either horizontally or vertically (not diagonally) to clear them from the board. As soon as you release your mouse button, the blocks that you've drawn on will disappear, but if you draw outside ...

While China has a history of blocking computer users' access to many sites on the world wide interwebs, many clever Chinese citizens have figured out that RSS feeds provided a way around the Chinese firewall. Until now. Ars Technica reports that China has started blocking any URL that starts with "feeds," "rss," and "blog." That makes it pretty difficult to access the feeds for an awful lot of ...

Yesterday David reported that Microsoft will be pushing Internet Explorer 7 to all Windows XP users via Automatic Update in Q4 of this year. He also reported that Microsoft will "provide corporations with the ability to optionally block or postpone the automatic download and installation of IE 7." In case you're wondering how, here's your answer: Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 7 Blocker ...